Wiardgroup

Hello Grant and fellow Wiardos...

Grant Richter wrote:
> I have a working Envelooper module with software. It is quite
> fascinating from an engineering perspective. I have been working for a
> year or so to try and find if it can do anything musical.

At the risk of displaying my considerable ignorance, I've been thinking
about this conundrum, how *would* you interact with the Envelooper do
something musical? I am reminded of Paul Perry's suggestion to all us DIY
types who think they have a product: first, design the user interface, and
write the manual :)

The Envelooper has two UIs, as I see it.  One is the physical module
itself, the other is the software used to create the shapes for each
section.  For the physical, well, as I recall, you'll have 4 outputs,
switches to select the mode, knobs to control stage time, some number of
per-stage gate/trigger inputs and outputs, and well I don't know what all
else.  It seems to me that all that is fairly straightforward, you patch
the outs to control VCOs, filters, VCAs, etc.  The one panel feature that
has a strong "IS it musical or not?" emphasis is the knob that selects the
timebase; the shorter the time, the more the bugmusic, right?

Grant, I think you mentioned that you had worked out a recorder function
to capture note, gate, and slope data from sequencers, joysticks, etc.? 
That's more than half the battle right there, I think.  When recording
joysticks, for example, I assume the 256 capture points are distributed
evenly across the timebase set by the knob?  So one way to increase
musicality would be to allow CV or Clock control of the timebase function. 
You could then send voltages (or variable clock) to play the gestures in
musically useful related time-bases.  Why, a Sequantizer would be ideal
here :) and maybe an Envelator to slew the output.  What other patching or
routing access to the stages is available from the panel?

The second UI, the software, seems like a *serious* opportunity to keep
things musically useful.  For the 3 people who are likely to use Wave256
and burn their own EEPROMS, that is :) Where I keep getting stuck is,
other than note data, how do you visualize 256 segments of a stage and
create musical elements out of them?  Will there be any way to dump or
load data other than burning a chip?  I wonder about the software UI, and
by extension, the concept of getting into the vast store of patterns and
gestures that the Envelooper could hold and building msic out of them.

* For instance: For VCA control, could the module or the software take
voltage/computer keyboard input to create a 10V gate pattern?  Any
Envelooper stage could take, say, spacebar (0 volts) for rests and enter
(5V) for gate, shift-enter (10V) to hold from previous step.  You'd want
copy and paste functions in the software and, ideally, some sort of
rudimentary grid layout.  Depending on where you set the timebase, each
"step" could be a micro-blip or a 25 second gate signal, and...have I got
this right, there is a mode where the 4 stages can start at the same time
and loop on different timebases?
* You could use one or two stages of the 'Looper to tweak the mod
inputs on an EnveLATOR, obviously.  But couldn't you also use a slow
timebase, and instead of sending a 10V pulse as above for a gate sequence,
have each wave hold an actual complete envelope shape of its own, to send
to a filter or VCA, etc.?  That is, instead of just punching through
static voltages and letting the Vactrols sort it out, slow the Envelooper
down and send a pattern of one-shot envelopes.  For this to work, I guess
the software ought to provide a small library of envelope shapes of
varying slope and depth, AR, AD, ADSR, that you could cut and paste into
each wave slot (or, rest, as above).
* am I getting too meta?  Also...working the software in this way would be
kind of tedious?

I dunno.  I begin to see why this is taking so long :)

Paul
-- 
been avoiding work for too long now.